Stalking the Billion-Dollar Art Auction

There’s no way around it. The single question on the minds of everyone who follows the art market—accepting the thundering momentum of recent sales and the failure of the broader economic environment to restrain it—is whether Christie’s will be able to top last season’s record of $975,222,500 in Contemporary art across two evening sales and two day sales.

Of that total, the Evening sale proper brought in $745m on the sale of 68 lots or just shy of an average Evening sale lot value of $11m. This season, Christie’s will have 82 lots in the Evening sale estimated in the region of $600m. If Christie’s is able to match last season’s average lot value and sell-through, the sale will weigh in close to $850m. That’s still not what the auction house was able to achieve by holding a second sale.